


interlude

by tentaclemonster



Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [54]
Category: Detective Takako Otomichi Mysteries - Asa Nonami
Genre: 100 Fandoms Challenge, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Established Relationship, F/M, Jealousy, Post-Book 1: The Hunter, Sexism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-21
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:28:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22831783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentaclemonster/pseuds/tentaclemonster
Summary: Takizawa thought it was a significant observation on the nature of women that becoming involved with them on an intimate level didn’t make them less of a mystery, but more of one.
Relationships: Takako Otomichi/Tamotsu Takizawa
Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [54]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1257083
Kudos: 9
Collections: The 100 Multifandom Challenge





	interlude

**Author's Note:**

> 054/100 for the 100 Fandoms Challenge. Written for prompt #70 - settle.

Takizawa would never come to like Otomichi’s apartment no matter how many times he was in it. 

That was his thought as he settled back against her bed, a trail of smoke drifting up from the cigarette he held between two fingers just inches from his mouth while the sound of water running drifted in from the bathroom. 

It echoed the same thought he had the first time he stepped into the place, too, after he managed to shake off the surrealism that came with the fact that he was in her apartment to begin with and before he got distracted by what he was in her place for. 

It was a big apartment, sure. Much bigger than one lady needed and not in bad condition physically, either. But it had no personality. No real personal touches. Presumably anything that would add such character was packed away in one of the many boxes that were stacked up in the corners, but Otomichi clearly wasn’t in any hurry to remedy the situation.

“You moving out?” Takizawa asked her that first time he’d been by, about six months or so back.

Otomichi followed his gaze to the box filled corner he was looking at and just shook her head. 

“No,” she answered, and that was that. No further explanation given. Takizawa didn’t want to make her think he really cared enough to pry, so he said nothing, though internally he was curious. He’d never let himself break and ask her about it, but the curiosity hadn’t waned a bit.

That was the problem with being a cop, though, Takizawa thought. You could say work was work and it got left at the door when you left the office all you wanted, but men like him could never turn their inquisitive nature off entirely. Takizawa’s previous experience with women didn’t help him out there, either; when a man had been burned once, it made him more wary of women in the future. It turned him from being not just inquisitive, but outright suspicious and always on the lookout for what they might be hiding. 

Romantic involvement only worsened the condition. If Takizawa was doubtful of Otomichi when he first met her a couple years back, then time and sex had done nothing to make him less dubious. His wariness had only transferred from the realm of the professional to that of the personal; he could trust Otomichi to be an adequate partner at work, sure, he knew that by now, but when their work hours ended then so did much of his trust.

Takako Otomichi the cop and partner was different from Takako Otomichi the lover and girlfriend. 

Takizawa still hadn’t managed to figure out the former entirely, but by comparison to the latter then who Otomichi was as a cop was a total open book. Takizawa thought it was a significant observation on the nature of women that becoming involved with them on an intimate level didn’t make them less of a mystery, but more of one. He thought that even if he could read Otomichi’s mind, he would be no more enlightened by her or those of her gender, only more perplexed.

Takizawa wondered if Otomichi’s ex husband used to live in the apartment, too, and that’s what the boxes were about. He didn’t know much about Otomichi’s marriage other than the fact that it had happened and it had ended, which bothered him more than he’d care to admit. 

The ex living here before the divorce would explain why the place was bigger than what one woman really needed. Maybe Otomichi didn’t actually own all that much to begin with and the boxes were filled with crap the ex had left and she couldn’t bare to throw away. Otomichi didn’t strike Takizawa as a sentimental sort, but she hadn’t struck him as a lizard, either, and look at how good she was on a bike! 

She also didn’t strike him as the kind of woman who’d have frilly, soft pink curtains on every window, the kind of thing that would be more suited to a little girl’s bedroom than a grown woman’s whole apartment, but there they were now, the only thing blocking the morning sun from burning out Takizawa’s eyes while he lounged back in bed and listened to soft splashing sounds of Otomichi bathing in the other room.

There was something almost perverse about screwing a woman while surrounded by little girl curtains in Takizawa’s opinion. Doing such a masculine thing while signs of femininity were hovering all soft and quiet in the background toed some sort of line, made the act of screwing itself somewhat better and somewhat worse at the same time. Not better enough to worry about why that was nor worse enough for him to think twice about doing it, but a substantial enough feeling that he couldn’t help but notice it. File it away and ignore it until later when he had nothing else to do but smoke and think.

More substantial a feeling was the fact that Takizawa really hoped he was wrong about the ex husband living here. If that faceless other man had lived here then that meant that Takizawa was walking where another man who Otomichi was involved with had walked, eating where he ate, sleeping where he’d slept, fucking where he’d fucked, and perhaps doing it all while surrounded by boxes of his things. There was a sense of masculine pride in being with a woman like Otomichi that came over Takizawa strictly during their off work hours, but there was something definitely emasculating about the idea that he was being with another man’s wife. 

Divorced was divorced, sure, but still. Thinking of Otomichi in that way made Takizawa’s lip curl. The lack of information he had about the ex husband himself and the marriage the guy had with Otomichi did little to help Takizawa out, either. It only made Takizawa’s imagination run wild about what the guy was like and how he might have been with Otomichi and why the marriage might have ended, and none of what Takizawa imagined caused him much happiness.

Thoroughly disgruntled and more than a little disgusted, Takizawa took a drag of his cigarette and reformulated his theory.

Okay, so what if the ex had never lived here? He and Otomichi lived somewhere else together, then. Something happened, they divorced, and Otomichi moved to this apartment while the ex either kept wherever they’d lived together or moved somewhere else himself and let the place they lived at before go to another person. Nevermind that the apartment was too big for Otomichi alone. Maybe she didn’t care, maybe she got a good deal on the price of it, maybe the extra room was why she liked it in the first place. Otomichi seemed the type to like lots of space to move around in. She was a big woman with a big attitude, that made sense. So that meant the boxes were full of Otomichi’s things and she...what? Just hadn’t gotten around to unpacking after living here for how many years?

It wasn’t that outlandish, really. Takizawa had known women to do stranger things than have a minimalist living space and a cop’s long working hours didn’t really do much to lend any real necessity to having your home be anything more than just a place to crash at between shifts. He liked that theory better. He thought it made more sense than a woman like Otomichi hanging on to a bunch of her ex’s stuff. 

Privately, Takizawa could admit to himself that the fact that this new theory tampered down some of the acid feelings he had bubbling up in him had a little to do with his liking of it, too. 

It just burned him a bit to think that Otomichi had been married before and burned him worse to think that she might still have some connection or feeling to whatever man she had been married to, even if it was as tenuous a connection as having some of the guy’s things in her apartment, even if those things were just the invisible footprints he’d left on the floor or the ghost of his past presence lingering in the bed Takizawa was now settled in after having had Otomichi in it and spending the night with her there after he was spent.

Takizawa certainly didn’t have anything of his ex’s things back at his place. She’d taken all that she wanted with her when she left him and Takizawa had determinedly went through the house afterwards and got rid of anything she forgot. He’d ripped up pictures of her alone and them together, only conceding to allowing the ones that included his children to escape unscathed since his daughter begged for them and promised not to put them up where he had to look at his ex’s smiling face. He’d tossed out knickknacks, thrown away clothes, gotten rid of a particular chair she’d always loved to sit in and every gift she’d ever given him. He’d dragged out the bed they’d shared together – mattress, headboard, and all – and bought a new one that wasn’t as kind to his back, but was infinitely preferable to Takizawa for the sheer fact that his ex had never been in it. He even replaced the sheets and pillows they’d put on their old bed to boot.

His children had thought Takizawa was nuts to go so far, that he was overreacting or perhaps being unnecessarily cruel with the methodical way he went about getting rid of everything that had the slightest trace of their mother’s presence still on it. Takizawa’s son had even accused him at the time of trying to erase his ex wife’s very existence by getting rid of her things.

Takizawa had scoffed and told him, “Why should I keep all her useless crap around if she’s not around herself? If she wanted any of it, she should have gotten it when she came by to pack up all the rest, but she didn’t. I want it all even less than she does. It’s no better than garbage to anyone now.”

But privately Takizawa knew that his son’s accusation was true. He  _ was _ trying to erase his ex’s existence along with the existence of their marriage, callously tossing out any evidence that she had ever lived under his roof or been in his life until only the children they shared remained. 

And now the children were all gone, too – off at school or living on their own. Takizawa had the place to himself and there was no evidence that his ex had ever stepped so much as a foot into the house much less that she used to live there. All the photos Takizawa had hanging up of his kids were of them alone or them with him. There were none where she was included. If a stranger walked into Takizawa’s house, they would have no idea that Takizawa had ever been married; if they looked at his children’s pictures, they’d have no clue who their mother was. 

If Otomichi came over, she would be no different. She might look for evidence of Takizawa’s ex, glancing around out of nosiness, but she would find nothing. Not a photo, not an old article of clothing, not the ring he’d stopped wearing long before the divorce was finalized, not so much as a stray hair. It was all gone, Takizawa had seen to that.

But that was only  _ if _ Otomichi came over, though. She never had. 

Takizawa wasn’t against the idea or anything. It wasn’t like he was actively trying to keep Otomichi away from his place. It was just that the subject had never come up. They’d always come to Otomichi’s apartment and the first time that happened there hadn’t been all that much of a discussion, either. 

Takizawa had taken Otomichi home after she’d been injured on the job towards the end of a long and arduous investigation. It was nothing life threatening, but it had been enough for the boss to order Takizawa to take her home himself and so he had. They’d gotten in a car and he drove in the direction Otomichi told him to until they pulled up near what she said was her building. Then for some reason, he’d turned the car off rather than leave it running like he somehow knew somewhere deeper than his head that she wasn’t just going to hop out and be gone like she should’ve done.

They’d sat in the car for a few minutes in silence and then Otomichi asked, “You want to come up for a beer?”

“Why not?” Takizawa replied, and so they both got out and made their way to Otomichi’s fifth floor apartment that was nearly empty save for some basic furniture and all those boxes.

“You moving out?” Takizawa asked her, and Otomichi told him no, then went to the kitchen area to get the beer.

A few too many drinks and some conversation about the case they’d just wrapped up later, they ended up in Otomichi’s bed where Takizawa got to know first hand the answer to his other cop colleagues’ favorite jibes about whether Otomichi was as good at riding anything else as she was a motorcycle. 

In the six months that followed that encounter, Takizawa’s last kid at home had moved out, he’d closed some hard cases, lost a good deal of the weight he put on post-divorce, given in to the fact that he was going to go bald anyway and shaved his head, and what should have been a single drunken fuck had somehow turned into an entirely sober habit. 

Takizawa was still no more enlightened about who Otomichi was or what she was about than he had been before, he still found her to be a complete pain in the ass at times, and he was no more in love with the idea of a woman being a cop than he ever was, but now he was regularly having good sex with a pretty woman who didn’t have the bad habit that most women did of wanting to talk about everything all the time and who seemed alright enough with the way things were going, and so he thought it was fair to say that he was, for the first time in a good long while, genuinely content with his life.

The ‘not talking about everything all the time’ thing was probably the reason why he had never invited Takizawa back to his place, though. It was also more than likely the reason that Takizawa knew very little about Otomichi’s ex husband or what it was she kept in the boxes around her apartment. 

He and Otomichi’s conversations were primarily about work. When they were on a case together, they talked about that case; when they weren’t, they talked about whatever cases they were working separately. Picking each other’s brains about them. Getting each other’s opinions. It was more helpful to his thought process when working a case than Takizawa would ever admit to Otomichi herself lest she get a big head over it and there were several breakthroughs he’d come up with that he could credit specifically to a comment Otomichi had made to him, though he’d never give that credit anywhere outside of his own head. 

When it came to personal information, however, the conversation was less free-flowing. It came out in bits and spurts, like those summer rains that would come on out of nowhere and last for only a few seconds before stopping, leaving the barest hint of wet on the ground as proof that they’d ever happened in the first place. 

The way it went was that one of them would reveal a bit about their family or history here, the other would make a comment about their own there, and then they’d move on to more professional topics of discussion. Takizawa couldn’t think of a single time he and Otomichi had a personal conversation that lasted more than five minutes unless he counted sex as a conversation (which he didn’t as very few coherent words were exchanged during the act).

For the most part, Takizawa was fine with this. It was less of a hassle to be with a woman who didn’t need to constantly talk in order to be happy and who didn’t need to be apprised of every thought that entered his brain. That Otomichi didn’t ask him incessant questions like they were rocks she was pelting at him, trying to crack him open and see what was in his head, already put her a step ahead of his ex wife. 

The way Otomichi was quiet with him at work like she was at first and still sometimes slipped into was annoying, sure, but Takizawa found that he appreciated the quiet during their off hours. It was a comfortable sort of quiet. Companionable. He didn’t mind it most of the time.

On the other hand, it also made it hard to know what was happening in Otomichi’s head, what exactly it was they were to one another, and where it was their relationship was going. None of those things kept Takizawa up at night or caused him to fret like  _ he _ was the woman in the relationship, of course, as he was too old and set in who he was to react like that. But there were times like now when he was alone and had nothing to do but think that he found himself thinking about the whole lot of things that he didn’t know about the woman he was sleeping with and wondering if it might be worth anything to try to rectify his ignorance. 

He could always toss out a question about her ex and see how she reacted. Ask her, “So why’d you get divorced anyway?” or “Did he leave you or did you leave him?”. It wouldn’t satisfy his curiosity, Takizawa knew, because one question would only lead to a hundred others and he might not like the answers she gave him. She might even get pissed at him for asking. Takizawa knew well and good that she had a snide streak in her that was nothing less than infuriating when she decided to let it out.

Better not to ruin a good thing then, he thought, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t do something.

Takizawa couldn’t see how it would hurt to take her by his place one of these days. Maybe wait until they were in the car and say to her, “Mind going to mine tonight?” and the worst she could do was say no thanks and they’d go back to her apartment like they always did. Nothing would be changed, but nothing wold be ruined, either.

Takizawa turned the idea in his head, picturing Otomichi in his house, eating at his table, naked in his bed. He found himself liking it. There were no kids there who might interrupt them or ask pointed questions about their father’s younger lover or judge him for having her, nothing around to make Takizawa wonder about Otomichi’s ex husband, no frilly pink curtains covering all the windows to make him feel like a pervert.

And if a small, vindictive part of Takizawa found a little pleasure at the idea of bringing a younger, prettier woman into the house his wife had chosen to leave and having sex with her in the bedroom (though not the bed) they once shared, well, there was that, too. It wasn’t a good thing and Takizawa didn’t feel proud about feeling it, but after what his ex had done, he thought he was entitled to a little vindictiveness. It’s not like his ex would ever know about Otomichi even if he screwed her in every room in the house, anyway, so while he wasn’t proud, he also didn’t feel all that bad about it, either.

That plan settled, Takizawa snubbed out the remainder of his cigarette on the ash tray that sat on the bedside table. He checked the time and saw it was still too early to get ready for work yet. Otomichi’s shift started soon, but his own was hours away. He’d go back to sleep, then, Takizawa decided. God only knew when a major case would come in and he would be cursing himself for not getting some shut-eye where he could find it. 

Takizawa let out a breath and pulled Otomichi’s thankfully not frilly pink covers over his body. He closed his eyes and slipped more easily into sleep than he thought he would, not waking even when the loud gurgle of the plug being pulled in the bath tub sounded from the other room as Otomichi got out of the bath and began getting ready for the day herself.


End file.
